


To Turn Aside, To Turn Away

by Margo_Kim



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Character Study, Dorian Backstory, Dorian Has Issues, Gen, Homosexuality, M/M, POV Dorian Pavus, Sexual Identity, Tevinter Culture and Customs, Tevinter Imperium, sexuality is confusing even when you are not confused by it in the slightest basically
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-01
Updated: 2017-11-01
Packaged: 2019-01-27 17:22:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,311
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12586880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Margo_Kim/pseuds/Margo_Kim
Summary: "So he was not ashamed of his preference in lovers. He was not. He had known his preference since his early teens, perhaps earlier, and he had acted upon it to the satisfaction of himself and his partners, and he was not ashamed. Tevinter was ashamed. His parents were ashamed. Dorian was not ashamed. Not about this."Or: Dorian has always known who he is and what he wants. Knowing has never made it easier. Also, he doesn't really know.





	To Turn Aside, To Turn Away

**Author's Note:**

> Content note for a lot of sexuality and gender stuff including: slut shaming, violence against a gay man, a cis man pondering the specifics of a trans woman's body, and boy, just a lotta introspection.

Of the women in his life, Dorian disliked Livia the most—though now with the distance of time and geography, occupied in freezing to death in the miserable south, he could admit that much of this dislike had little to do with her personality. He knew almost nothing about her, save the list of qualities that had attracted their parents to negotiate the match (strong mage, good bloodlines, adequate cheekbones, et cetera). No doubt Livia had at some point been handed an equally bland list of suitable breeding traits from which she could, if she so desired, attempt to extrapolate a real person. She was skilled in spirit healing, Dorian’s mother had informed him. Necromancy was antithetical to her magic. In his more sentimental moments, Dorian liked to imagine they’d both began to hate each other in absentia more or less simultaneously.

They saw each other frequently when they were young, but only in passing, another young privileged face amongst the crowds of Tevinter’s future leaders. They’d rarely conversed. Perhaps both reasoned that they had years of not talking to each other that they needed to practice for. Besides her constant presence in his mind as a human hourglass running down to the blasted divine union, she had almost no impact on his life. She never sought him out; he avoided her as well and patted himself on the back for his consideration of her feelings. In the twenty or so years of their engagement, they had gotten away with only having two interactions of any significance.

The first was a dinner party when he was twelve and she was eleven. It was the longest time they’d ever spent together. Children sat at the far end of the table, and since they were the only two children attending a gathering of magisters interested in trade reform, they spent three miserable hours kicking each other’s feet. They weren’t permitted to speak, of course, nor express any sort of personality that might be visible from the table—Altus children were seen, not heard, but only when necessary and when posed in aesthetically pleasing facsimiles of carefree but promising youth—so there was a vindictive joy amongst the young in making a peer break face. Neither Livia or Dorian yelped, grunted, flinched, or cried, unfortunately, but they also both hobbled away from dinner with rictus smiles. Livia had further to hobble than Dorian, since the dinner had been held on the Pavus estate. Dorian considered it victory by mutual destruction.

The triumph was somewhat undercut when his mother set him to kneeling on rice by the altar after she got wind of him using their dinner to beat his would be bride. Dorian’s protestations that Livia had beaten him right back, as evidenced by his bulbous bruising stretching from ankles to knees, earned him another hour of punishment.

Not Livia’s fault, he could concede two decades later, but hardly the start of a love match.

The second meeting of any note was during that time in Dorian’s life he hoped historians might elide from their glowing biographies of him. Perhaps they could call it simply The Dark Years, or something equally vague. “We just do not know how the handsome, brilliant, and esteemed hero of not just the Imperium but all of Thedas spent his early twenties,” they might write, after they had burned the historical whorehouse receipts. Ideally they would include Livia’s diary in the pyre. Not all of it, of course—no matter how tempting—but at least whatever length covered their glorious reunion. Surely that was an acceptable sacrifice to history. How many pages could she have taken to record the two days of his recuperation in her rooms, after he’d stumbled piss drunk onto the Herathinos estate, thrown up in the foyer, and passed out on the staircase?

He’d come to break off the engagement. Dorian was, to this day, surprised this approach did not work.

Wincing back on the incident now—a good nine years still insufficient to blunt the agony of recalling that particular humiliation—Dorian could not recall if he ever actually saw Livia during his brief stay there. He’d been too sick—the usual euphemism employed when the drunk was from a good family—to be put back out on the streets. Perhaps Magister Herathinos had considered it politically unwise to allow her daughter’s future husband to choke to death on his own vomit before the wedding. It would have been a clever idea to have Livia nurse him. Dorian had spent enough bleary hangovers reading increasingly sentimental romances to know that nursing almost always led to flirting, pining, touching, and eventually some ten pages of lovemaking on the sickbed.  

But if Livia had thought to coax affection from the bedraggled drunk invading her home, Dorian had remained too drunk for any ministrations to stick. Someone dragged him into a guestroom, cleaned him up, and left four chamber pots helpfully lined up alongside the low bed, but it almost certainly was not his fiancé. Some poor slave, no doubt, saddled unexpectedly with the care and maintenance of some extra toff with enough money and time to piss a few years away in a state of pique, the cause of which he hardly understood and would not articulate if he did. There’d been a damp washcloth on his forehead, enchanted to stay warm and smelling of lavender. Dorian felt more love towards that washcloth than any flesh and blood creature who witnessed his shame.

On the dawn of the third day, Dorian woke up with the kind of stabbing headache that forced unwilling clarity on his mind. In the years that followed, in his vast travels since that miserable morning, he’d had occasion (unfortunately) to shower in snowmelt. That was the closest he’d ever gotten to icy horror that gripped him when he woke in the Herathinos guest room, stripped down to someone else’s small clothes, in a room that smelled like lavender and the kind of bodily fluids Alti pretended they didn’t have. The feeling was remarkable, actually. Dorian had spent so long indulging in debauchery that he’d forgotten the feel of being debauched.

“Kaffas,” he croaked to the silent room. Thankfully, it didn’t reply.

The clothes laid on the small chest under the window were not his, but Dorian was not about to ask someone to track down his laundry. He changed into the provided garments—a simple tunic and undyed trousers, he’d feel almost insulted by their rustic simplicity if that didn’t mean Dorian felt no compunction about stealing them. He had no money, but he doubted he’d arrived with any. How had he gotten here? Horse? Dorian hoped not. He currently didn’t have a horse and wasn’t keen on figuring out who he might have borrowed one from. Chaise, maybe, though unlikely he would have found one in the part of town he’d began his drinking. So carriage then, or maybe he’d simply walked. Simply walked, drunk enough to think that coming here had been a good idea, past the estates of every family in Qarinus that mattered.

Luckily nobles slept late, as a general rule. All that late night debauchery, or deal making, or blood magic. Whatever sin you fancied when you had the power to chase it. The servants and slaves might have seen Dorian slip out the guest room window (trampling some, in Dorian’s humble opinions, poorly placed flowers in the process) but they could hardly think less of him than they did already. Dorian had begrudgingly nursed his fair share of drunks who happened to pass out in range of his sense of responsibility; the most his poor dignity could hope for is that he’d kept pissing himself to a minimum.

Three days later, a package arrived to Dorian’s apartments, brought by a stately looking elf who regarded Dorian with the impeccable reproach possibly only after a lifetime in the service. “The gentleman’s affairs,” he said, presenting Dorian’s folded robes. “Laundered, of course, sir.”

“Of course,” Dorian said, declining to ask what had needed to be laundered out of them. He took the clothes. The elf waited. “Thank you,” Dorian tried. The elf waited. “I do hope the guest room is back in order.”

“Impeccable,” the elf said, impeccably. “It simply awaits the return of its sleep clothes. A household must always have garments on hand for unexpected visitors.”

“It must, mustn’t it?” Dorian muttered. “One moment, please.”

Dorian found the stolen clothes balled up and tossed on top of his writing desk. He folded them as best his could. “The Herathinos spare pajamas,” he said, returning to his entry way. “Unlaundered, unfortunately. I’ll give you coin for that.”

“If it pleases the gentleman,” the elf said, in a tone that said thirty silvers should prove adequate, but fifty would be preferable assuming the gentleman in question wasn’t the pathetic wretch that everyone suspected he must be.

Dorian tried to buy back a scrap of respect with a gold coin. He didn’t think it worked.

After the elf left, and after Dorian pressed his head to the door for a bit, trying not to remember what little of that time he did remember and trying not to imagine what he’d blessedly forgotten, he picked up his returned robes to hang them and possibly himself in the closet when a parchment fell out. Dorian dropped the robes and picked up the letter instead. It was one page, folded and unsealed. He opened it.

_Mother invites you over for tea sometime. She would like to discuss a spring wedding. Respond in your own time._

_Livia, of House Herathinos_

He closed it. He tossed it on the floor next to the robes. He poured another drink.

 

 

So that was Livia. She was the only proper fiancé, which was to say the only one proposed to by his parents. Dorian himself fielded offers from other women, especially once his ongoing work with Alexius brought him permanently to Minrathous, where he was far enough from home that his reputation became charming. Women enjoyed his company, and he enjoyed theirs, and all enjoyed it most when it was clear what everyone wanted.

Antonia Gratius, a scholar of great wit and no connections, wanted a regular dance partner at the balls of the great estates, having spent too many seasons wilting along the wall. Decima of House Nymphidious wanted a bevy of male admirers on call and on her arm at all times, for the proper mortification of her nine older siblings. Sabina of House Equitus wanted a tutor in necromancy and paid him in invites to the best parties south of the plaza. Florentina, who’d been married and divorced so many times that she used whichever last name currently suited her, simply wanted a friend who, in her words, wouldn’t move to mount her after a ten minute conversation. “It’s the price of scandal,” she told Dorian once, with a cheerful laugh that would have been rude to wince at. “Every man assumes once you’ve had one cock, you’ll have any.”

She’d been seventeen when she’d first married, taken straight from her Harrowing to be sold by bankrupt parents to a magister four times her age who already had an heir, a spare, and a few dozen bastards scheming for his seat. Tragically, her first husband died three months into their marriage, in a duel with a man who became her second husband. She divorced him two years later, in the public event of that summer; untangling their vast combined estates took an act of the Magisterium. She alleged misconduct and mistreatment on his part, and when the Magisterium still wouldn’t grant separation, she seduced the head of the finance subcommittee and then publically accused herself of adultery.

Florentina got the divorce, and an official censure along with it. Dorian always felt insufficiently wicked next to her. _He’d_ never been denounced by a majority of the leaders of his nation.

There were three more husbands between then and Dorian’s friendship with her. Florentina always laughed as she anecdoted her past, breaking love and trauma in discrete one to ten minute chunks with proper punchlines.

“I must stop falling in love any man who’ll stick around to fuck me twice,” she said one evening, her head resting upon his shoulder when they were both too drunk to sit upright. “That’s why I enjoy your company so much. You won’t even fuck me once.”

Dorian—young, sloshed, feeling suddenly too hot, too stiff, too naked—said, “I would if you wished me to.”

She laughed. “If you wished me to? Don’t you sound duty bound all of a sudden. Did your father invite you round for another chat?”

He jerked away, and she tumbled, half collapsed on the chaise next to him. Florentina blew her hair out of her face to properly glare at him. “Rude,” she said. “I had almost ground my skull down on your bony shoulder enough it was comfortable.”

Dorian was too drunk to feel churlish. That immunity from the lesser feelings of squalor was why, in fact, he drank. “I would have thought you were comfortable on any man.”

She threw a pillow at him. “Don’t be an ass,” she said in a mothering sort of tone that made Dorian want to be especially childish.

“I am—you’re the ass implying—I could—” Dorian didn’t know what to say, didn’t know what he was trying to say and what he was trying very hard not to say. She stared at him as if he were having a stroke. It almost looked like pity.

The night before he had kissed a man—some anonymous man, they were all anonymous men, in anonymous alleys—Dorian had bunched his fists in the man’s tunic and whispered, “Stay a while,” and the man had sneered with the mouth Dorian had loved and pushed him away.

The day before that night his mother had sent him another letter, asking when he might come home to visit. _There is the matter of the wedding, which must and will come to pass_ , she wrote. _I was not ready to marry your father when I did. One is never ready to pass from the idleness of youth to a man’s duty and legacy. Yet always one proves oneself ready only when the passage nonetheless comes._ Dorian had burned the letter to ash that had still clung to his hands when he reached to stroke the stranger’s stubbled cheek.

And so he had woke up drunk this morning on Florentina’s bed, while she snored next to him. They were fully dressed in the shroud of familiar scandal. One man might be said to kiss another man in the dark, but if that man then spent the night at the estates of Florentina, Minrathous’s indecent dowager divorcee, then one may draw reasonable conclusions about who the man had actually fucked.

For that was what Florentina offered men who kissed men in the nameless dark. She cheerfully attached herself to whatever man needed to be noticed in a scandalous woman’s company, and let reputation speak its own version of divine truth. Dorian thought those men were cowards, were smart, were sensible, were weak, he thought a thousand different things about the anonymous men in anonymous places, and he pretended that he did not know that he was thinking about himself.

“I wouldn’t have you,” Dorian spat.

“I wouldn’t let you,” Florentina replied. “You would be horrible at cunnilingus.”

“I could—” he said and did not finish. He did not know what he could do, except that in trying to say it, he knew he could not. “Fuck you,” he said instead, weakly. He ran his hand over his face. It was afternoon. They’d woke entwined chastely around each other in the pleasing languor of drunkenness and they’d continued drinking since then. His head pounded. He felt his heartbeat in his eyes.

“I know you do not like women. I know you prefer the company of men,” Florentina said simply. “Surely this is not a surprise for you?”

“Don’t tell me what I am,” Dorian mumbled into his hand still cradling his head.

“Most of my friends are inverts. I recognize the symptoms.” She leaned back on the chaise. Dorian watched her feet cross. “I did not peg you for the self-loathing type. If I had, I would have laid down some clothes before you got started to soak up any spills.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Don’t loath yourself.”

“No, not that.”

“Invert?”

He scowled confirmation, or grimaced, or maybe it was a wince. It put him in mind of some skinless thing, a body flipped inside out for the viscera to be remarked by all who saw.

Florentina laughed. “Then what? Pervert? Degenerate? What do you call yourself?”

In place of self-awareness, he possessed venom, and so said, as he wore his mother’s face, “I may or may not wish to fuck women. It may simply be the case that I don’t wish to fuck you. I have always been an insufferable elitist, don’t you know? I would never visit an establishment common enough to admit the masses you have.”

There was a horrible satisfaction in feeling her stiffen beside him. In feeling the blow land. “It’s bold of you to chide anyone for their bedfellows,” she snapped. “At least mine make it to my bed.”

“And how long do they care to stay?” Dorian scoffed with the loose cruelty of good wine and practice. “No wonder you love all one of the men who’s ever bothered to come back. Ridiculous, don’t you think? You and I have an equal chance of marrying a man who loves us.”

Florentina reared. And then steadied. Her face smoothed with the chill of a woman no longer surprised by men. “I suppose you are right,” she said simply. “We all bear our burdens in life. Yet one needn’t be such a cunt about it.”

Then she summoned her slave, who showed Dorian to the door.

 

 

Dorian saw less of her after that. They were still friends of a sort, the kind of friends one can hope for in Tevinter, but they fruitlessly waited for the other to apologize first. He knew he ought to say something, both about his spite and his spite’s lack of imagination, the laziness with which he reached for the easiest switch. In Tevinter you were many things—your class, your family, your connections, your history, your reputation—but you were nothing so much as your sexuality, untamed. Dorian was a pervert; Florentina was a whore. How tiresome it was to be reminded of it.

Of course, she ought to say something too. Hadn’t she been cruel as well?

Some drunken night when they found each other together again, Dorian ventured the smallest admission that he had, perhaps, acted with less tact than he ought to have comported himself with. Florentina said she had not noticed anything out of character.

If Florentina would not offer clemency so that he could magnanimously offer it in return, Dorian debated extending the favor to himself in her place. Drunk and maudlin, he pardoned himself easily enough, but in more sober lights, his fractured friendship with Florentina was once again a mistake he bore neither lightly or well. She weighed on him with outsized bulk he didn’t understand—he had been cruel to her, but he’d been far crueler to others before and since, and others had been far crueler to him. Tevinter was quite good at cruelty. It seemed strange to fixate so on one minor instance of it.

Still, he did not apologize. His pride was coated in the rancid taste of shame, and try as he might (he did not try) he could not swallow it. Florentina had voiced knowledge of a fact that Dorian needed to believe was still under his control to disseminate; he had been angry that she’d broken the illusion of anonymity that he thought he abhorred. Did abhor. Yes, he thought of kissing a man in the sunlight sometimes. It didn’t matter. Direct sun could be such an unflattering light.

Dorian didn’t enjoy shame, he decided. Humiliation, he could acknowledge that as the natural byproduct of an exuberant life, and its lesser cousin embarrassment was always welcome a few years after whatever incident caused it, when enough time passed that even Dorian could find humor in his failings. But shame. It settled in his gut like rot.

So he was not ashamed of his preference in lovers. He was not. He had known his preference since his early teens, perhaps earlier, and he had acted upon it to the satisfaction of himself and his partners, and he was not ashamed. Tevinter was ashamed. His parents were ashamed. Dorian was not ashamed. Not about this. Not about who he wished to fuck and who he wished not to.

“Ah,” said Mae when he attempted to articulate this. “But what about who you wish to _love_?”

“Happily married people are insufferable,” Dorian said.

Mae smiled beatifically. “Aren’t we?”

Maevaris Tilani was something else. Something worse than either pervert or whore, and something larger as well. He’d met her through a party thrown by Vita Vibius, a woman who so publicly courted other women that Dorian felt obliged to be self-conscious on her behalf. He rarely attended Vita’s gatherings, and every time he did, it felt scandalous in a way that the richest, filthiest whorehouses could never manage. Once in looking for a bathroom, Dorian had walked in on an all-female orgy in one room and two women reading love poetry to each other in the next; he wasn’t sure which threatened the state more.

Mae encouraged Dorian to spend more time in that part of town, where men frequently kissed on the streets while the police arrested them for doing so. Dorian, personally, felt he already spent too much time there. The place clung like smoke—your own nose grew tolerant to the smell, while everyone else knew you stank.

It wasn’t that he disapproved of Vita and her ilk, no more than he disapproved of himself, but he couldn’t help but lament the ways they had, in their lifestyles, made the choice to have their personhoods truncated. To live openly inverted was to be exclusively inverted—that is, to be transform from Dorian, scion of House Pavus, apprentice to the brilliant Gereon Alexius, researcher of the most theoretical branches of magic, and necromancer extraordinaire, to merely Dorian, man who fucked and was fucked by men.

And, as Mae pointed out, loved men as well. Or wished to. Irrelevant as it was.

“My heart is not the organ I wish to discuss,” Dorian told her.

“Must I pretend to be fascinated by your cock instead?” Mae grinned and leaned her chin on her hand. “I am. Tell me everything, darling. How’s the girth?”

“Perfection itself. We’ve bred for that.”

“And here I feared your lineage shot their load on the cheekbones.”

“Never. You can’t fertilize a womb if you finish on the face.”

“I suppose marital sex does lean towards the practical.” She pursed her lips in thought. “Do you suppose many Alti get adventurous with their spouses, or is the height of debauchery foregoing the sheet with the hole cut out?”

“Considering my parents are the couple I have the most data on, I shan’t speculate,” he said. Then, after a moment of speculation, “If they had experimented, I might have had more siblings. That may have been nice, assuming we didn’t indulge in the traditional fratricide of our class.”

“Love’s no guarantee of siblings,” Mae pointed out. “Look at your mentor and his lovely wife. They couldn't be more disgusting towards each other—”

“As if you and Therold have the right to call any other happy couple _too loving_.”

“—and yet Felix is alone.”

“Perhaps they realized they’d gotten the best child possible on the first go,” Dorian said, because Felix was not there to hear him be fond. Terribly embarrassing, admitting you enjoyed and admired someone when they were there to hear it.

Mae laughed. “The two of you it seems have acquired siblings in each other. I wonder if you two live out that other high society sibling tradition.”

Dorian reached for the wine bottle. “Squabbling over inheritance?”

Mae held out her glass. “Surreptitious incest.”

Dorian grimaced at her as he poured and Mae laughed, her head thrown back to show the elegant line of her throat. She had the same bump on her larynx as he had. But so did many women. Its presence became deviant only on a deviant body. No need, therefore, to notice it at all, so Dorian reminded himself that he needn’t have noticed it.

“I am not interested in Felix,” Dorian insisted, topping himself off. “And if you say something about protesting too much, I’ll remind you that I only have to protest it because you won’t stop insisting.”

“How can I, when it’s so fun riling you up? You two are horribly platonic, darling, I know.” Mae snorted. “He’s a good man who respects you. That’s not your type at all.”

“Evil magisters,” Dorian muttered into his glass. “Aren’t you supposed to be comforting me about Rilienus?  I would have thought you’d appreciate that I wasn’t hopelessly pining over _another_ man with no interest in me.”

Mae hummed, sprawling back on her cushions, glass nearly emptied. “Your uncharacteristically healthy relationship with Felix does make for a nice change. Still, at least with him, you wouldn’t have been fucking the man you were hopelessly pining over. You’re wonderfully inverted; he’s tragically everted. He’s rejected your whole gender rather than yourself. Wouldn’t that be nice?”

“It wouldn’t if I was pining. You know what a miserable loser I am. Disqualification before the match begins is still loss.” _Inverted_ , he thought, and could not stop the twist of his mouth. “And you know I don’t like that term.”

Her eyes were closed, her glass resting on her stomach. “I know, dear. You don’t like any terms. You so hate being labeled, it’s very exhausting.”

“I don’t object to proper nomenclature,” Dorian said. “But it’s not needed in this case.”

Mae spared the energy to crack open an eye to roll at him. “Some might say having a name for the nameless is essential.”

“Do you say?”

“Yes.”

If Dorian had found no acceptable word for himself, then Mae suffered an even greater silence made all the worse by its ringing loudness. Better to say it all out, that she was a woman who had been so frequently mistaken for a man that she insisted on issuing the correction. A mouthful, to say the least. But better, kinder, more truthful than most words Dorian had ever heard describing such a state.

Dorian known about Mae before they met. Who in Tevinter did not? Ugly whispers were the most reliable form of communication, and the less power the whispers held over their subject, the uglier they got. Impotent rage named Maevaris Tilani many things, but it could not unname her as magister. Whatever was said about her, whatever snickered in company where all members were assumed to think the same, she was a magister. That was the rank one had to be not to disappear into their own deviance. Dorian’s mother had told Dorian that when he assumed the role of Magister Pavus, Dorian could have as many body slaves as he wished and no one would speak of it; Dorian’s mother had said this as enticement.

Dorian plucked up the bottle and quaffed the last swallows of it. “And what have you found then?”

“ _Crosser_ is serviceable enough for us to find each other,” Mae said, using the most common term Dorian heard around That Side of town. “Although I object to the idea that I am crossing anything. I stood in one place and the border crossed me. There’s a medical tome that would call me a _sexual correctionist_ , which is still not ideal but more value neutral than the last few terms healers have explored.” She shrugged a shoulder, a gesture more casual than her tone. “Perhaps I’ll borrow _invert_ if you aren’t using it. If you lend credence to those fascinating rumors about the state of my cock, it makes more sense for me than you.”

Dorian did not ask for the state of her cock. He had once, early in their acquaintance, and she’d told him what he needed to know, which was chiefly to learn when to shut his mouth (a lesson Dorian suspected would never take full root). But she’d been thought a man, which implied the traits of men, or the traits people associated with men but didn’t have to mean man—Dorian was still working on his understanding of gender theory, having previously given it little thought beyond _being a man means being with women, that’s quite inconvenient_. Mae was a woman, but she had the body of a man, but if she was a woman, then she had the body of a woman, and whatever body of a man she had in her possession was most likely just the corpse of yet another would-be assassin.

But, to infringe further upon the privacy of his imagined Mae, if she were naked before him, she would have the body of a man, but Dorian could not imagine her body as the body of a man because he knew Mae, an undeniable woman. If he didn’t know Mae, he would not have this debate. And maybe a great many women had been naked before him in those anonymous dark places, and as he and they made themselves deliberate strangers to each other, he had seen them as men. But he did know Mae, and so whatever the state of her cock, it was her cock, and therefore not a cock he wished to experience, as it belonged to a her.

He had been somewhat flummoxed when he’d first followed this train of thought—that if he did not want Mae, his preferences were not purely of the anatomical.

Maybe that was the cheat he’d been looking for—marry a wife who was actually a husband who mattered only so much as he had a womb and would be forced always to live as a wife, and Dorian had a cock and would be forced always to live as a wife’s husband, and together the line would continue because that was all that mattered. All that ever mattered.

Maker, would it have killed his parents to suffer a few more children? Surely one of them would have come out eagerly interested in societally acceptable procreative sex.

“Weak reasoning, but I’ll accept the offer,” Dorian said. “Inversion is yours.”

Mae accepted his bequeathing with a magnanimous wave of her wineglass. “And what shall we call your wicked kind?”

“ _Wicked_ sounds sufficient,” Dorian said. “Or else I’ll stay nameless.”

She gave him a smile that someone with a different mother might have called motherly. “The oldest magic is naming, you know. To know the true name of something is to control it completely.”

“It sounds dangerous.” He drained his glass. “Best not to have a name at all.”

 

 

Mae, of course, failed to grasp the deep complexities of Dorian’s philosophy and soul—he didn’t object to labels, except insomuch as they applied to him.

(“No,” Mae said dryly, “I did figure that out. That was not a particularly difficult mystery.”

“It was very complex.”

“You’re in your late twenties struggling with your sexuality in a society that hates it, that’s the easiest mystery in the world.”

“How dare you. I’m mid-twenties.”

“Thirty approaches, darling, on the swiftest of wings.”

Dorian shuddered and Mae, twelve years older than him, kicked him in a friendly sort of way.)

He didn’t like labels, except insomuch as they always sounded like an accusation. Indictment of a crime of which he was undeniably guilty. There were men in Tevinter who fucked other men, and then, Dorian finally admitted, there were men like him. Men who fucked other men but married women, bore children, kept body slaves and young lovers squirreled away, and they hated men like Dorian, who wanted—

Well. That was the question.

This was easy enough to admit: he had sex with men, repeatedly and exclusively. He, now and then, sought something beyond the merely physical—he tried not to think of Rilienus catching his eye at a party and how they smiled to each other for a moment too long. Rilienus was married now, so the smile meant worse than nothing. Dorian met men in bathhouses and whorehouses; they gave each other fake names and risked everything they held dear in their lives for a few moments in a quiet alcove or a shitty mattress in a room that was neither of theirs. Dorian had invited a man home once—tall, blond, a Laetan he’d met in one Circle or another—and the sight of a man sweating and writhing amongst Dorian’s things was so unsettling, Dorian could not tell if he was terrified or aroused beyond reason. He did not repeat the experiment to find out.

This too was easy enough to admit: Dorian was spoiled rotten, ask anybody. He was the only son of a powerful magister and his equally powerful wife. He had wanted for nothing growing up—what childhood could have been more blessed, more privileged? His family owned estates; his family owned people. Selfish, to want more. To stand at the top of Tevinter and suggest that Tevinter had failed to provide.

(But, and here was something harder, something almost unsayable: Mae, crying with silent calm in her parlor, dressed as a scandal, which was to say dressed as a widow when in legality she and Therold had never married. They were forbidden to. It was one thing to live as a woman, another to claim a woman’s right to marry the man she loved. The law said Mae was a man, and Therold was a man; he died legally a stranger to the love of his life. How evil. How cruel. Dorian held her hands and told her that. _This is evil_ , he said, _this is cruel._  And because Dorian was selfish, always selfish, no matter what, selfish even in the face of love, he thought, _if it is evil and cruel for her, why isn’t it evil and cruel for me?_ )

 

 

Philo was a sweet boy. Younger than Dorian (who was still in his mid-twenties, _Maevaris,_ he still himself had the goddamn bloom of youth in his cheeks) and new to Minrathous. An apprentice for Magister Calabanus, a spirit healer and doddering centrist who had allied with Dorian’s father on some naïve futile bill. Calabanus studied magic to restore an amputated limb, even after the tissue had died. As such, he had sent his apprentice to bother Dorian for texts on necromancy, that school of magic healers pretended did not exist until it suited their purpose. Philo was no great scholar but he asked questions without pretending that he already knew the answer. He enjoyed the café by the Librus Extremis, and he bought Dorian’s lunch and the tea that followed. He laughed at Dorian’s jokes. Philo had red hair and deep brown skin. His teeth were white and large; his smile seemed indecently wide. Especially when he aimed it at Dorian. He drank his tea slowly after he burned himself. He raised his fingers mindlessly to his singed lips. He did not seem to mind that Dorian watched.

When Philo had exhausted his master’s questions, when the conversation entered the lull that signaled either an ending or a shift, Dorian asked, “What part of town are you staying in?”

“In my cousin’s unfashionable town estate, west of here. The Pax Roxus neighborhood.”

“My apologies.”

Philo’s hair bounced as he laughed, not offended at all. “It’s not as mean as its reputation.” And he smiled that sweet unseemly smile. “A bit like you that way.”

Dorian forget for a moment to glare. To retort. His mouth opened itself, and he had no words. “Well,” he said after the stumble. “Don’t tell anyone else that. They’ll be more than happy to provide evidence that you’re wrong.”

“I like to gather my own information,” Philo said. “That’s what research is all about, right?”

Dorian was tired of suggestion. Tired to guessing what was innocence, what was guile, what was code for a language Dorian had learned by ear. Perhaps Philo said nothing besides the words he was saying. Perhaps there was no shared crime here. Perhaps Philo was the opposite of whatever Dorian was: a man who slept with women the way Dorian slept with men, exclusively and with distinct, necessary pleasure in the gender of their partner. But he smiled at Dorian the way men who weren’t like Dorian never smiled at other men.

(“Labels,” the voice that sounded like Mae chided, “if nothing else are boons for sentence construction.”)

Maybe it was simply the kind of smile that left Dorian hoping that Philo was a man like him.

Dorian looked away. “Research is about mocking your colleagues when you don’t agree with them and plagiarizing them when you do. If you do it properly, you need never open a book at all.”

Philo shook his head, still smiling. “My mother once told me that the most tiresome thing you can do is to pretend to be worse than you are.”

“Nonsense.” Dorian leaned back in his chair, posed himself to his best advantage in the quiet light. “It’s the national pastime.”

The café was closing, and the sun was setting. Wisps of fire rose to light the street like stars fallen to earth. Minrathous in its ancient, crumbling, bloody glory sprawled itself at night with languid grandeur, like a lover with nothing left to prove. The city was a dream of a marriage taken to the old age of true love. _I love you as you are, as you love me in my completeness. My history is your history is our history. We made each other, my darling. Our children are the beloved orphans of a happy marriage._

“It’s beautiful at sunset,” Philo said, so softly Dorian forgot to fear that he’d spoken aloud.

“It is,” Dorian agreed.

Philo’s foot bumped against Dorian’ss. “Even Pax Roxus?” he teased.

“I can’t say.” Dorian bumped his foot against Philo’s. “I’ve never fallen so low as to be there at sunset.”

Philo smiled, just for Dorian. “Would you like to?”

Philo was new to Minrathous. No one invited you home. Not for something like this. You didn’t do that in Qarnius either. You didn’t do that anywhere in Tevinter.

“And what might we do there?” Dorian asked, with a bluntness that made Philo blink. Dorian gave him a wan smile that he meant to look more aloof than he feared it appeared. “Forgive me. In my old age, I grow tired of the words unsaid.”

Philo frowned. “I thought you were only twenty-seven.”

“Maker bless you,” Dorian said. “Do you want what I want or shall we part here?”

Philo’s eyes were dark as the midnight sky. “I want to kiss you,” he said quietly, so low that the murmur of the nearby fountain nearly drowned his words.

Dorian bumped his foot against Philo’s again. This time, he kept it there, pressed against the warm skin of Philo’s bare calf. Dorian’s sandal covered too much; his skin craved skin. “That’s a fine start,” Dorian said, and Philo flushed as prettily as the sunset. He was so beautiful, so young and fearless and naïve and beautiful. He should belong here, in a city his opposite and equal.

It was a shame that Dorian’s memory of Philo must be so ugly. He hardly remembered Philo’s soft smile. When Dorian dreamed of that night, he remembered Philo’s other grin, his lips pulled back in agony, his white teeth stained pink with the blood pouring forth. His grimace aimed at Dorian, ripped from Philo’s bed by the thugs who beat him until their knuckles bled for being in the wrong man at the wrong time.

 _I’m sorry, I’m sorry,_ Dorian thought as his father’s thugs dragged him away. _I’m sorry, Philo. I’m sorry that I am not even surprised. I’m sorry this is the only way this ever could have ended._

What a relief, what a strange relief after so much dread, for the shoe to finally drop upon one’s throat.

 

 

The Thalrassians were famous for three things: good hair, strong cheekbones, and pyromancy. Aquinea embodied her lineage, down to the pointedly icy personality—mages who matched their manner to their magic were so dreary. What a positively southern thing to do. She had reminded Dorian of this frequently after he chose his specialization; she apparently thought necromancy synonymous with moping.

Dorian had thought to counter that there was nothing more gauche than death magic practiced with too much good cheer, but his mother’s countenance had always discouraged it. She was not a woman with whom one jested. She aimed always for the jugular.

“My girl tells me you aren’t eating,” she said from just outside the door to his quarters. His pettiest revenge—once he had found that his parents had warded him imprisoned within the estate, he’d warded himself secured with in his bedroom. As his mother had pointed out, it was exactly Dorian’s style to pick a smaller prison for himself, just so long as he could pick the prison.

Dorian hadn’t denied it.

“I am not hungry,” he said, without rising from his desk, without looking up from it.

Aquinea clicked her tongue. “In a hunger strike, you’re supposed to moan about how you’re suffering. That’s what gains you freedom.”

“If I thought you cared about my suffering, I might try.”

“If you think us apathetic to your concerns, you may as well eat,” she said mildly. “How will you flee on an empty stomach?”

“How will I flee drugged with magebane,” Dorian spat. He shut his eyes, which he would not raise from his desk. He could not, he would not, he could not. He could not stand her placid fucking face, watching him as he paced and cursed and raged like a caged animal.

His mother sighed. Sighed. As if Dorian were a child throwing a tantrum.

So he glared at her. He slammed his fists on the desk, to see if she would do something. His mother did not flinch. “Have you come again to lecture me out of being a selfish cocksucker?” Dorian’s hands ached. “It’s worked so well these last weeks, why not give it one more go?”

“Do you imagine I liked fucking your father?” Aquinea asked. She raised an eyebrow. Dorian jerked his gaze away. “I did what I had to do. For my family. For my country.” Her voice twinged with—something. He didn’t know. Some emotion she hated herself for showing. It would be gone any moment. “No one is asking you to love the girl. Least of all the girl.”

He closed his eyes. Hungry as his was, he had the strength for anger or weariness. He preferred the anger. “I want more than that,” he said. The words were for himself. His mother could listen if she wished.

Dorian was not sure if his mother had ever liked him, let alone loved him. Perhaps she loved the half of him that came from her. His father had the decency to rage when he visited—to threaten and promise and threaten again. To appeal to Dorian’s reason or his feelings or his sense of obligation. Aquinea did none of that. She treated him as she always had, like an unwanted guest at an otherwise perfectly curated dinner party. Though she was half responsible for his imprisonment (Aquinea and Halward’s first joint venture since his conception, he was sure), Dorian struggled to remember to hold her responsible. Betrayal implied at least minimal trust and affection, feelings Dorian and Aquinea had never shared. His father, at least, loved him.

(Was this what love looked like?)

“I have on occasion wanted more,” Aquinea said. “I did not seek it to the destruction of everything I already had.”

 _You should have,_ Dorian thought. _You should have, you coward._ Unbidden, for the first time in years, the image of Florentina came to him, and Dorian had to laugh. Laughed all the harder when he saw his mother frown. They should have been better friends to each other, him and Florentina, the teenaged divorcee who’d degloved herself yanking free from her marriages’ manacles. What an ugly mess she’d made of freedom, what a wretched monster Tevinter had painted her. Florentina, national scandal, public crisis, marrying and divorcing and marrying and divorcing and marrying again for no other reason than that she believed that she could marry the man she loved. She didn’t know how to find him, but Dorian couldn’t judge her for that. He had no illusions about what would happen were he to live openly.

(Rilienus, his mouth pressed against the back of Dorian’s neck one last time. He married in the morning. He’d marry stinking of Dorian. “No one’s ever going to love you like I do,” Rilienus said, sobbed, snarled, as Dorian shuddered and came, gasping “yes, yes, yes,” in horrible agreement. They parted amicable. Dorian went to Rilienus’ wedding. This was the happiest of all possible endings.)

But what it would be to live openly. What a glorious, messy freedom.

“May I ask what is so funny?” His mother’s voice sounded like the crack of thin ice. She hated, oh, how she hated everything that she did not know.

“I was thinking how wonderful it is to be an unrepentant pervert,” Dorian said, still smiling. “If only you’d had the strength to be a scandalous whore.”

Aquinea left. And not long after, so did Dorian.

 

 

Lavellan’s head rested on Dorian’s shoulder. Dorian’s legs rested on hers. He had an arm wrapped around her, she had an arm under his neck, the remaining limbs twisted as close as they could, like trees grafted together. She smelled like sweat and the sweet, floral oil she used to cover up the sweat. He imagine he smelled exactly the same. They shared the oil the same as they shared the tent, the bedrolls, and the blankets that they huddled within for warmth. Strangely wonderful, he thought, what a pleasure it was to share that which enriched both of them to have.

“I hate the south,” Dorian grumbled into her hair.

“I hate the south,” Lavellan concurred, albeit in a marginally more cheerful tone. Being such a slight, lithe thing, she no doubt benefited more from Dorian’s body warmth than he did from hers. Dorian had complained already to her this miserable evening that huddling for warmth with her felt too similar to cuddling one of his skeletons. She nuzzled closer and Dorian yelped.

“Kaffas, how is your nose still that cold?”

“How is your neck this warm?” She pressed her entire face into the hollow between neck and shoulder and sighed happily. “Bull was right, you do run hot.” And then, after the mention of Bull’s name, she laughed and exclaimed, “And now you’re hotter! Are you blushing?”

“Don’t sound so thrilled,” he groused, absolutely not grateful in the slightest that the darkness hid his face because he was, of course, not blushing. “It doesn’t befit the dignity of the Herald of Andraste.”

“Does blushing at the sound of your lover’s name befit the dignity of the scion of House Pavus?”

“Don’t say _lover_ , my dear. There’s no love involved, and even if there were, we’re better than a word like _that_.”

“But what is he then?” she teased.

“A recurring mistake,” he grumbled, to hide the smile.

Lavellan huffed a little laugh that said she had nevertheless heard it. “I’m…surprised,” she said eventually.

“That I make mistakes? Alas, it’s true.”

She wriggled in a way that seemed meant to be punitive. “The surprise is when you don’t make mistakes.”

Dorian would have elbowed her in the ribs, if he hadn’t been aware that her ribs were somehow pointier than his elbows. Instead he said, “The Venatori made me quite a flattering offer, I’ll have you know.”

“But they don’t ever drink Ferelden ale. You’d hate it.” She bumped the top of her head against his chin. “I’m happy for you two,” Lavellan said after a beat, wistfully sad.

“You certainly sound it.”

“Hush. I am happy, I promise. I’m just gay pining a little.”

Dorian hid his wince in the dark. Cassandra, they’d recently found out, had not one ounce of inversion to her. Lavellan assured Dorian that Cassandra had been kind about it, understanding, awkward but no more so than she would be about anything emotional; Lavellan had, however, said this after an hour of crying in Dorian’s room. Dorian had held her—for the first time discovering how horrendously bony she was, the Herald of Andraste was nothing but elbows and knees—and silently thanked fate that he’d never fallen in love with Felix who was, as Lavellan would put it, stupidly straight.

Coincidentally, the second time Dorian and Lavellan embraced had been when he’d learned of Felix’s death. On the whole, he preferred huddling for warmth, talking about his—about Bull. It was more emotionally confusing, but far less emotionally devastating.

Dorian said none of this. It was far too cold for that kind of talk. “Our dear ambassador is quite fond of you.”

Lavellan laughed, sounding somehow incredulous at the prospect, as if half of Skyhold was not desperately, madly in love with her. “She’s not.”

“I promise you.”

“You’re just saying that because she’s into women.”

“I’m saying that because she is into you.”

“I’m not going to fling myself at whatever gay woman is in my vicinity.”

“Funny you should mention that, just the other day Sera was saying how _woof_ you look.”

“Are you sure she wasn’t pointing at a Vasoth behind me?”

“Well,” Dorian conceded. “Now that you suggest it.”

Lavellan laughed again, and Dorian smiled. He enjoyed it when she laughed. Another strange pleasure, sweeter shared. She sighed against his chest. “I am surprised you and Bull are still together. I hope you don’t mind me saying it. It’s a good surprise.”

Dorian almost assured her that she could not be more surprised than he was surprised. But he wasn’t. Not at all. Being together—him and Bull, Bull and him, one strange unit that was some new creature all together—made a kind of sense that was either terrifying or—not. Or not terrifying at all. “At least _he’s_ a warm bed partner.  Did you know he doesn’t even use a blanket? He gives me his so I have two. Astonishing. I should have slept with him since Haven.”

Lavellan laughed and said, “Are you saying you stay the night?”

Dorian opened his mouth. Whatever he planned to say did not come out. After a moment, Lavellan sat up, just enough to squint at him. “Yes,” Dorian said, pulling her back down so he would not have to look at her. “Sometimes without sex first.”

It was, without a doubt, the most perverted act he had ever confessed to.

Bull liked to kiss Dorian in the middle of the tavern. Bull liked to pull Dorian down into his lap as they played cards. Bull had done neither of these things, because Dorian would not let him. Dorian perhaps would never let him. In the sunlight? On the street? With a man with a presence like a beacon, all eyes drawn to him? Was Dorian to take this man’s hand? Was Dorian to smile at this man like Dorian had always dreamed of being smiled at?

Here was a thought for cold nights: Bull in bed, sticky with sweat, laughing, and Dorian lying on top of him, sticky as well, laughing as well and laughing even harder as Bull’s laughter bounced him. Laughing at some forgotten joke, the words faded but the joy remain.

Here was another: Bull, sprawled, thoroughly fucked out. Dorian collapsed beside him, a puddle of triumph at reducing his ( _just say it_ ) lover so. “Fuck, kadan,” Bull groaned. “Fuck.”

“Quite, amatus,” Dorian agreed.

They did not ask each other what the endearments meant. The words simply came so easily to their lips that neither noticed until morning.

Lavellan was quiet, her ear pressed to his beating heart. In the silence, Dorian thought some more of Bull. “Can I ask you something?” she said at last, quiet, almost childlike.

For once he answered sincerity with sincerity, and said simply, “Yes.”

“In my clan—” Lavellan snorted. “And what my clan would think, me asking a shem from Tevinter about this. But. I mean.” She fell silent again, before she found her words again. “There’s such an emphasis on keeping our ways going. That means children. And that doesn’t necessarily mean the neat categories that humans made for marriage, but—it does. A lot of the time. At least biologically. You married someone you could have a child with. And there were women I could have had a child with, but not in my clan and even if I met one…it was a lot to count on that I’d love her.” Lavellan sighed. “The world is full of women I don’t love.”

“Likewise,” Dorian said, though by strange fate he currently found in his arms one of the ones he undeniably did.

He was even glad, on the whole, that she'd punched him that one time. It had clarified some thoughts on slavery. 

Lavellan elbowed him. The elbow was bony as expected. “With my clan—it was easier to just not. So I didn’t.” Silence again. “Cassandra was…” Lavellan sighed. “Nothing, I guess.”

“Your first,” Dorian, ever the academic, corrected.

“Sure. First rejection.”

“An essential first, I’ve been told. No one, of course, has ever rejected me.” When Lavellan didn’t laughed, Dorian added, “Besides, I suppose, the entirety of the Tevinter Imperium.”

“Fuck them,” Lavellan said. She buried her face in his chest. “I know there’s nothing wrong with me,” she said, her voice so muffled by his robes that he could hardly hear her. “It just feels like there is.”

“I know,” Dorian said. And then, he added what he thought Bull would add. “There’s not.”

“I _know_.” Lavellan gave a watery laugh. “I just—even after—I’m not—” She bit off her words with a snarl of frustration. Then she took a deep breath. Dorian did not tell her what he assumed to be true, which was that she would be just fine; Lavellan at twenty-three was better at self-soothing and self-awareness than Dorian had ever been. Or currently was. “How did you stop being ashamed?” she asked.

Dorian was not aware that he ever had.

Then he thought about a week’s time, when they’d go home. How home meant Skyhold. And Bull would be at the gates waiting. And Dorian would ride up on horseback and cherish the novelty of looking down on him. And Bull would smile up him. And Dorian would—he would—

He would kiss Bull right there in the sunlight, in the street, in the crowd, in the center. He would kiss Bull because he was selfish and he wanted to kiss Bull. Because Bull wanted to kiss him. Because their mouths fit so nicely together. And people would stare, because that was what people did. They stared at what was beautiful.

“One day I decided,” Dorian said, “that I needn’t ever be ashamed again.”

“Just like that?” Lavellan asked.

“Just like that.”

**Author's Note:**

> for generally bad opinions about dragon age, please consult [my tumblr](http://andhumanslovedstories.tumblr.com/tagged/dragon%20age%20updates)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] To Turn Aside, To Turn Away](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14243619) by [kalakirya](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kalakirya/pseuds/kalakirya)




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